Grime / Dubstep

A new sound has dominated the British summer of 2010. No it's not dubstep bass, grime bars, UK funky riddims, or house rollage... it's the atonal blare of the vuvuzela, the horn of choice at the football World Cup, currently being held in South Africa. And while for some it's a sonic irritant during a vital sporting contest, for others it serving as an odd sort of wake-up call. Perhaps it's been driven by the sporting spectacle or maybe it's just a bit of serendipitous timing, but a South African influence is seeping into the London bass matrix.

Any South African influence within dubstep, house, and UK funky sticks out. If you're speaking in general terms, the primary external influences on these UK sounds in the last decade have come from a fairly limited number of locations: Jamaica (dub, reggae, dancehall), the U.S. (hip-hop, R&B, house, techno) and to a lesser extent Germany (Berlin techno). That's not to say that you can't point to the occasional, say, Japanese-influenced dubstep track or Nigerian-inspired grime tune. But it's fair to say that until recently, South African flavors in this context were minimal. Yet in summer of 2010, there is a hitherto buried South African influence emerging across the pirate airwaves.

Evidence is strongest in the 130 bpm realm where UK funky, former dubsteppers, and UK house DJs are currently thriving in a house-catalyzed culture of low definition and high creativity. Kode9's recent flagship mix CD for !K7 featured South African track "Pleaze Mugwanti", a selection source pretty much unheard of within the dubstep sphere in previous years. Mujava is one of the country's most prominent producers, following on from his underground hit "Township Funk", which received remix attention from Skream and one of Kode9's acts, Ikonika. Mosca and other members of the Night Slugs camp have been playing tracks by DJ Cleo. Hyperdub's LV recently unveiled a fresh new dubplate entitled "Boomslang" that features the vocals of Smiso (aka OkmalumeKoolKat) and was recorded in his kitchen in Joburg. Oneman has been battering one of about 15 remixes London beats label BBE are putting out of "Mshini Wam" the new single by Spoek Mathambo [pictured above]. He's a 24-year-old South African rapper, DJ, graphic designer, and illustrator. As his press release claims: "Spoek sees himself as a part of a new wave of energy in Africa, which is intent on nurturing a sense of progressiveness while maintaining a pride in culture." He's also a keen listener to Scratcha DVA's Grimey Breakfast radio show on Rinse.fm.

"It seems like London music is just a hectic mess at the moment and the SA influence is in there somewhere," chuckles Gerv from LV, and he of all people should be able to spot it, having been born in Cape Town but brought up in London from the age of 6. "Hectic mess haha, I like that: in SA slang 'hectic' can mean 'bad' and 'bad-meaning-good...'"

Whether good, bad, or bad meaning good, LV are a diverse, happily ill-defined production trio. Earlier this year, their South African house "OKZharp" mix made waves, built from, in part, tracks swapped with taxi drivers while out there. That journey also resulted in a number of collaborations, including with Smiso, the vocalist on "Boomslang".

"It came together in quite a pretty skitzoid roundabout way," explains Gerv. "It started in January when I went up to Joburg from Cape Town to play a couple of DJ gigs there and Spoek [Mathambo] suggested I give his mate Smiso a call. So the day after the first gig I went round to Smiso's place to chill and we hit it off, I had a mic with me so we set up in his kitchen and he chatted Swazied madness over a few LV beats. When I got back to the UK we messed around lifting cool bits out of his freestyles and one of the resulting tunes was 'Boomslang...'"

LV have also worked with Spoek Mathambo and a few of the tunes have ended up on the latter's album for BBE. Gerv is accepting of the new terminology for Mathambo's sound. "I think 'Township Tech' was a term coined by Spoek Mathambo for some of his stuff but it seems quite a good fit for quite a lot of the stuff I've been hearing. Spoek is very proud of where he's from but he's also a total sponge, devouring sounds and scenes and spitting it all out in this great mishmash that is just uniquely him. When I was planning my trip out there, various people including Marcus from Hyperdub suggested I give him a call. It was pretty mad when we met how much we had in common musically, we pretty much bonded over Newham Generals, Big Nuz, Scratcha's breakfast show, DJ Rashad, and PM Dawn haha..."

The role of local identity in scenes and how it affects whether they can grow or get exported can be counterintuitive. If you look at vocal grime, for example, the very local traits that made it so nationally critically acclaimed-- the use of dense, unique slang, micro-street politics between participants, local pirate radio infrastructure-- also prevented it from expanding internationally in its pure form, and kept it from it easily being adopted by grass roots participants in other countries. Apart from a few exceptions (Dizzee's Boy in da Corner, Lethal Bizzle's "Forward Riddim/Pow") the participants that have gone on to national success (Chipmunk, Skepta, Tinchy Stryder, Tiny Tempah) have mostly had to water down the sound's local qualities to expand their audience nationally. Skepta's even talked about using less dense slang while at gigs abroad.

House, by contrast, has come a long way from its roots in early 1980s Chicago to become a globalized, international sound. And while this can in some ways be seen as a critical weakness-- that it doesn't speak strongly of, nor strongly to any one cultural group-- its universality unites people. With the influence of house so strong in the summer of 2010 on the London pirates, it's seems that it is this common ground that is allowing South African influences to seep into London in new ways.

Take DJ Kismet for example, a key player in the Circle camp that are unique pushing a house sound out of London that is distinct and separate from the UK funky movement. In an interview for his Rinse 12 mix CD notes, when asked about the geography of their music, he says: "I would say it's an international sound, and that kinda shows in where the music is coming from: all over the world. As long as you make good music, there's a worldwide market, it's not really UK based."

When asked where are the hotbeds of talent, where are the places where a whole bunch of producers are coming out of right now, he replies: "I wouldn't even say there's one particular place because when I was doing a bit of research to find out where they're coming from they was from all over the world: Europe, South America, Argentina, South Africa. South Africa the scene is obviously big there at the moment, it growing and I do actually speak to a couple of people from over there... It's house music in general in South Africa that's growing at the moment."

Kismet has been playing anthems from South African based producer Kentphonik, in particular the "Hiya Kiya (Rocco Deep Mix)". Marcus NASTY and the former Roll Deep DJ now turned minimal producer Wonder has been playing "Turn Me On" by South Africa's Black Coffee. Both tracks feature on Rinse's forthcoming compilation "I Love Funky". And while these two tracks follow the global house template faithfully, it is also uncanny how UK funky seems so similar to SA kwaito, seemingly having co-evolved down similar rhythmic paths once they'd both independently absorbed the same US house substrate.

Gerv from LV sees the parallels between South too: "There's an obvious rhythmic similarity there with kwaito and SA house, those broken up snare triplets over the 4/4. And I think you can also hear a similarity in those emotive bendy chords and brash percussive synth lines but it seems accepted now that the funky thing mainly came out of UKG and U.S. house. The interesting thing about the U.S. house influence on funky is that DJ Fresh and various other slightly-older SA house DJs have long-standing connections with Masters at Work and people like that, so perhaps there's an indirect second-hand connection there too..."

Gerv also points to Smiso's experimental group Dirty Paraffin as ones to watch ("crazy lazy nihilistic stream of consciousness party raps mixing up all kinds of slang"), as well as the Shangaan movement, where younger generation are reclaiming their parents' music by playing their township pop tunes at 45 instead of 33... and going crazy for it. Yet it's perhaps important not to over-state the emergence of these producers or indeed to make any great claims in this framework about the state of dance music-- in all its forms-- in South Africa itself. But it is certainly true that in 2010 in a London dubstep, UK funky, and house context, never has the South African influence been so strong, even without the World Cup pumping the deafening sounds of 40,000 local vuvuzelas into the global homes of the world.

Dusk + Blackdown "Margins Music Live" tour ft. Durrty Goodz and LHF continues 10th September in Reading ft. LHF and Kowton, 11th September in Kendal. Facebook Group here, new photos here. The LHF EP1: Enter in Silence is out now on Keysound. Follow @martinclarkLDN on Twitter.